“Already here. I’ll meet you on the bench by the front stairs to the PD.”

“I’ll be there in five. Have you talked to anyone yet? I’ve got nothing.”

“Yeah, your old pal Kurlen’s running lead on this. The victim, Mitchell Bondurant, was found in the parking garage at WestLand’s headquarters on Ventura about nine this morning. He was on the ground between two cars. Not clear how long he was down but he was dead on scene.”

“Do we know the cause yet?”

“There it gets a little hinky. At first they put out that he’d been shot because an employee who was on another level of the garage told responding police she had heard two popping sounds, like shots. But when they examined the body on the scene it looked like he had been beaten to death. Hit with something.”

“Was Lisa Trammel arrested there?”

“No, from what I understand, she was picked up at her home in Woodland Hills. I still have some calls out but that’s about the extent of what I’ve got so far. Sorry, Mick.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll know everything soon enough. Is Kurlen at the scene or with the suspect?”

“I was told he and his partner picked up Trammel and took her in. The partner’s a female named Cynthia Longstreth. She’s a D-one. I’ve never heard of her.”

I had never heard of her either but since she was a detective one, my guess was that she was new to the homicide beat and paired with the veteran Kurlen, a D-3, to get some seasoning. I looked out the window. We were passing a BMW dealership and it made me think of the missing husband who had sold Beemers before pulling the plug on the marriage and disappearing. I wondered if Jeff Trammel would show up now that his wife was arrested for murder. Would he take custody of the son he had abandoned?